“Baths, sex, and wine our bodies undermine; /

Yet what is life but baths and sex and wine?”

-Roman jingle

 I can remember visiting Palmyra and hearing the story of some poor Roman engineer having a fit over the Arabic and therefore angled central street, making elaborate architectural efforts to conceal the bend. For Romans, main roads had to be straight. It has always captured our shared humanity for me: I can well picture a modern engineer going to similar lengths to ensure elegance. Such minor details help humanize ancient cultures, and remind us that human nature has changed little in the intervening thousand years.

In some ways, we know a surprisingly large amount about the Romans. We can say what they ate for breakfast (bread, oil, and sometimes cheese); that moralists condemned shellfish, central heating, hothouse flowers, and out of season roses; that they worried that eating meat was immoral (probably not due to carbon emissions); that they invited guests to parties in sets of 9, because that’s how many people would fit around couches on three sides of a table; and that they laughed at a man’s taste when a joke made the rounds that he threatened his shipping agents that any works of art from Corinth damaged in transit would have to be replaced by replicas just as good. In other ways, we know almost nothing: all of the above, for example, refers only to a narrow subset of elites, not to the plebian Roman citizen.

Wilkinson has written a book to attempt to tell us how the Romans lived; not what they did or who they conquered, but what their everyday lives were like. It’s a noble effort; historians often seem to focus on political and military history exclusively, and though I enjoy both those forms of history, I’d be the first to admit they’re hardly the whole story. Unfortunately, it faces the standard problem; there simply isn’t information about what everyday Romans did or thought. What we have, and we have a lot, is almost exclusively from the Senatorial or upper class, or later the Emperors themselves.

The book is appealing: the personal detail of everyday life in Rome is interesting, and it humanizes the Romans. The book does, however, require knowledge of history of the Empire in order to piece it all together, a fact for which the author is unapologetic.  Still, it would have been nice to see a book capture both the broad themes of Roman history as well as provide some of the quotidian detail. Failing that, I can’t deny that it’s fun to relish some of the everyday tasks and troubles of Romans, even given the incomplete picture we have.